I’m hopeful we can get to a place where the stigma is lifted from people going through anything alone. It can be incredibly isolating . ... I refuse to allow it to define me.
Pop singer Mariah Carey on her struggle with bipolar disorder,
The Segal Centre’s 2018-19 season will begin with a multi-TonyAward-winning Broadway musical taking the stage in the theatre’s main space, newly named in recognition of a gift from a noted Montreal-born, now Tel Aviv-based businessman and philanthropist. Once, which will play in the Sylvan Adams Theatre, as the 306-seat hall is now called (Oct. 7 to 28), is Enda Walsh’s stage version of the 2007 Oscar-winning film about a Dublin-based busker and his sunny romance with an aspiring pianist. Andrew Shaver, whose productions of Sherlock Holmes and The Graduate previously played the Segal, will return as director.
There’s a change of pace with Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (Nov. 18 to Dec. 9), directed by Caitlin Murphy. What happened after Nora scandalously slammed the door on her marriage at the end of Ibsen’s 1879 classic? According to Hnath’s play, which took Broadway and London’s West End by storm last year, she returns after 15 years to explain herself to her abandoned husband and children.
Two distinctly unconventional musicals are up next. Children of God (Jan. 20 to Feb. 10) is Corey Payette’s celebration of the Indigenous spirit in the face of the horrors of Canada’s residential schools system. A co-production with Vancouver’s Urban Ink, it recently toured Canada to sold-out houses. Then there’s the return of Rick Miller with Boom X (Feb. 14 to March 10). The one-man tour de force brings his spectacular hightech and hugely energetic personal history lesson beyond Woodstock, through the fall of the Wall and up to 1995.
A notorious slice of theatre history is put in the spotlight in Paula Vogel’s Tony Award-winning play Indecent, which Segal boss Lisa Rubin will be directing (April 28 to May 19). It’s about the controversy and obscenity trial that greeted the 1923 Broadway opening of Sholem Asch’s The God of Vengeance, a play about a Jewish brothel owner’s attempts to become respectable.
The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre will be presenting a reading of Asch’s play to coincide with Indecent. The company will also reprise its musical revue, A Century Songbook (June 16-30) and produce A Bintel Brief, based on the famous Yiddish advice column begun in 1900s New York.
Meanwhile, in the Segal Studio, folksinger Ben Caplan will star in Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, Hannah Moscovitch’s acclaimed Klezmer-music celebration of her grandparents’ 1908 journey from Romania to Canada (Dec. 4 to 16).
As all this happens in the theatre’s two spaces, the Segal will also be taking past productions on the road, with The Hockey Sweater: A Musical at the NAC, Bad Jews and the Crow’s Theatre co-pro We Are Not Alone in Toronto, and Prom Queen: the Musical at the Grand High School Project in London, Ont. More details at segalcentre. org. No doubt the just-announced $650,000-plus contribution to the theatre from the Canada Cultural Investment Fund will help them on their way.
Two world premières from major writers feature in Théâtre du Nouveau Monde’s 2018-19 season, which was announced last Monday. Next February will see Le Mystère Carmen, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s new musical play about Bizet and his famous opera. In May, Michel Marc Bouchard follows up his Shaw Festival/TNM hit La Divine Illusion with La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est réveillé, which revolves around a world celebrity returning to her village to bury her mother.
Before these, there are classic but contrasting views of Roman antiquity, with Robert Lepage creating a francophone version of his Stratford Festival production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in January, followed in March by Racine’s Britannicus, which, despite the title, focuses mostly on the Emperor Nero.
The season opens on Sept. 11 with Emmanuel Schwartz playing Candide in a new version of Voltaire’s satirical classic, followed in November by Bilan, a 1968 play about the dark legacy of the Duplessis era by Marcel Dubé, who died in April last year. More details at tnm.qc.ca.